


My Pretty

by Ankaret



Category: Marlow Series - Antonia Forest
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-13
Updated: 2009-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:39:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten years later, Ginty reflects on the events of <i>The Marlows And The Traitor</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Pretty

There were all sorts of things that she ought to say to Nicola, and they were all unsayable. If any of them had arrived on her tongue at the proper time, she might have said them - she'd always had a way with words in _that_ way, sorbet-light and of the moment - but they kept arriving like baleful deliveries in the middle of the night, or when Nicola had just turned away with a _laceratingly_ business-like expression.

Ginty carried on doing her makeup. She couldn't think why she was making so much of a fuss about any of this, really. None of them had seen Bob in years. She hadn't even recognised him when he swam up to the bar beside her, his face sun-warmed brown and knowing, his eyes giving her that sidewise tribute that she had, by now, got used to as her due, and that didn't even give her fluttery feelings inside any more, in the general run of things, much.

Except that from Bob, it did. The tip of her kohl pencil foundered against her skin, making its line jump into the territory of the expensive eyeshadow that made her green-blue eyes look entirely green and entirely blue, both at once. She smudged it crossly with her little finger.

She supposed she _ought_ to say something to Nicola along the lines of _I know he was yours first_. Unfortunately, for Ginty, thinking _I know I ought_ always came just before _I know I can't_, inseparably paired like part of one of Peter's chess gambits.

And besides, her imagination conjured up Nicola, standing there looking _scornful_ in a way Ginty herself could never quite consciously manage, though she ought to be able to considering that Nicola's face was basically a rougher-skinned and generally duller version of her own.

She supposed other people would find it funny that she was abashed at being looked at that way by Nicola. Various people - her mother, defending an absent Rose Dodd; Fergus, inexplicably and blisteringly angry that she'd passed a new girl she hadn't _officially_ been asked to shepherd off onto Emma; occasionally, and least rationally of all, Ann - had told her off for being scornful, superior, flightily self-centred, and she knew none of it was true, but it still hurt her inside exactly as if it was. Which made it doubly unfair that _Nicola_ kept wandering around excoriating her with her looks and no one took _her_ to task for _that_.

Ginty started lining her other eye. It was only that _he was yours first_ would make them both think of Patrick.

They both saw him, occasionally. Nicola more often, Ginty supposed, since she was at Trennels more, and saw him at Mass. Ginty couldn't _think_ why Nicola carried on being R.C when the man she'd converted for had thrown her over, though she wasn't interested enough to get distressed about it as Ann did.

The last time Ginty had seen Patrick had been in an expensive side-street in London. The unexpectedness of seeing him in London had been enough to make her feel jangled inside, as if she'd jumped, though she hadn't. He had been holding the door of a small restaurant for that Becky creature he was engaged to, and looking down at the top of her uninteresting head as she scuttled into the candlelit, expensively brandy-scented gloom with the same expression of adoring, protective self-consciousness he'd always turned on those perishing hawks.

He'd taken the foul birds up to have something to be misunderstood for, Ginty always thought - and thought again now, as she competently wielded a brush full of blusher - so that people could ask him why on earth anyone wanted to go in for a hobby like that; and she suspected he had the same reasons for taking up Becky, who was flat-chested and silent and never looked anyone in the eye and generally reminded Ginty of Rennet Starkadder. She wished they'd both fall down a well. Her mother had said she thought Becky had _poise_ once; and Ginty, indignantly unable to see anything worth looking at in that lifelessly silky brown hair and washed-out skin, had burned inside for a month.

Patrick, apparently, wanted someone who looked up at him like a baby bird, and _liked_ being spoken to in a voice full of affectionate teasing as if she were the aged spaniel Bucket. Peter had heard Patrick talking to her in that tone of voice once - calling her a lily-livered loon for having come out without an evening wrap - and had gone cream-white in the face and spent the rest of the weekend saying nothing much beyond _No_ and _I'm fine_ and doing loud aggressive carpentering. Ginty, herself, hoped the woman fledged into a parrot-faced matriarch and spent the rest of her life making his a misery. Though there wasn't much hope of a Regina-like beak in Becky Martin's, soon to be Becky Merrick's, snub.

She supposed she knew why Nicola was behaving so peculiarly.

It wasn't Bob Anquetil himself; it was the memory of St. Anne's-Byfleet and the lighthouse and the cold roaring sea, and the last time they'd seen him. It was as if they had sailed into a current that was drawing them back towards the memories of that year, running all the time below the surface of things.

She tapped blusher off the brush with a too-steady hand. It wasn't surprising that Bob hadn't recognised her. Or, at least, he had; he'd remembered Giles Marlow's sister, wearing a green feather fascinator instead of a hat, who he claimed he'd admired from afar at some naval function. He hadn't connected that with a whey-faced child being lifted out of a boat.

_Someone_ had, though. Someone had seen the truth of her. She unscrewed her lipstick, began dabbing at it with the lip-brush, and then thought, suddenly, better not, and laid her hands flat on their mirrored selves in the dark glass of the dressing-table.

She'd been convinced Mum would ask about it. After all, other people must have had the same thought. Jocelyn certainly did, and asked Monica when Ginty wasn't there; and Monica had given her a thorough piece of her mind in the ten minutes between English and Chemistry, Ginty knew, because she'd asked Isa why Jocelyn was looking so sick two days later. But no one had asked in those first days of chores and packing and hospital visiting and staring aimlessly at the bright flat sea that came after. No one except a frightening, carbolic-smelling police matron; and she'd pretended not to understand, and said, 'But I was sharing with Nicola the whole time'.

Except that that wasn't, wholly, true.

She'd slept through Thursday night in the lighthouse, after the horrors of the day; but Friday defeated her with its prickly inaction, and she woke in the night, cold, and prey to terrors. The sleeping bag had got itself horribly bunched around her legs. She shook herself out of it, shivering. Some bits of her clothes were still damp and some were salt-dried and felt like cardboard. She thought about shaking Nicola awake for comfort. No, that wouldn't be fair, but if she made rather too much noise looking around in the dark for chocolate, and the warm sleeping lump that was Nicola woke anyway...

Nicola didn't. Not even when Ginty patted the upward moonlit curve of her cheek, and then shook her ungently by the shoulder.

There were footsteps on the stairs. She froze in panickment.

"Herd of young elephants - " he said, in a beastly jovial tone of voice that came from a head and shoulders set higher than she had expected in the gloom. All of her life, adult men had been something to stay out from under the feet of, or to talk charmingly to on special occasions like race-meetings and Daddy's leave. The idea of having one as an antagonist was almost more peculiar than anything else that had happened. She thought she would just think of him as another larger child, a taller more unpleasant version of the horrid friends Peter used to bring home.

Her teeth chattered. She was the oldest, even if none of the others had thought of it yet. And also, in an unpleasant squirming way, she felt like an _outsider_ with Peter and Nicola in a way she hadn't been with Peter, Nicola and Lawrie.

Nicola liked Peter better than anyone but Giles, and Peter liked Nicola. Which, considering Peter's disastrous taste in friends the rest of the time, said something about Nicola, p'raps. She would have to tease Nicola with it later. She gave a small half-giggle that didn't feel at all like her own.

"Here, now, what's this?" He put a warm heavy arm around her and settled her down onto the bunk. She wasn't sure whether his presence beside her was comforting or not. He smelt of the sea, just as they all did, and of tobacco-smoke. "You're the one who was scared to go on the U-boat, weren't you? The one who told me to stop hurting your sister," he added in a different tone of voice.

Ginty tensed, wondering whether he had one of those foul unchancy slow-burning tempers and had come upstairs to take revenges - her thoughts shrank, blessedly, from what _kind_ of revenges - for that; but it seemed she was getting credit for a bravery that most of the time she didn't possess. What she had, and what carried her through, was a talent for being in the right place and saying the right thing at the right time. It was the gift of timing that made her so competent at riding and diving, and that made it so shattering when it failed. He seemed _amused_ by her, as if she'd unexpectedly stalemated him at chess because his mind was half on listening to the radio. But it was her victory for all that.

"Here, drink this. It'll help you sleep." He passed her something that felt as if it ought to be cold, but was warm. After a moment her brain caught up with her fingers, and she realised - a hip-flask, its cold metal warmed by - well, his hip, she supposed vaguely. She remembered their London charwoman's dark imaginings concerning white slavers, which made another panicky giggle burst in her throat like a hiccup. Whatever Foley had planned, she really doubted it involved chugging off to sell her and Nicola in South America. She didn't know what he'd do about Peter. He'd be rather a drug on the market.

He'd drown him. She remembered him holding the pistol to Nicola's head earlier. She couldn't imagine how Nicola could sleep so peacefully after that, though Nicola had no nerves to speak of. She really wished Lawrie was here; she'd be no _help_, but at least she'd be the one who couldn't cope, and that would have saved Ginty from wondering which of them it was in Lawrie's absence and knowing it was her.

Foley was still there. Not a solid warm presence as Giles or Daddy might have been; thin and sinewy and strong, with those brown wrists and pale sea-grey eyes she remembered, and liable to do almost anything at any moment.

"Drink it," he said amusedly. "I promise you it's not drugged. I used the last of my sleeping pills in last night's hot chocolate."

Who on earth would say something like that, so calmly, to his victims? she wondered, and then the word _victims_ made her feel silly and melodramatic, as if she had been making things up.

She hadn't made up that pistol, or the shipwreck. Those things had been real. She remembered the hot chocolate. She hadn't been able to drink all of it. It tasted nasty and chalky; she passed it silently along the rough table to Peter, who for some reason was starving hungry all through those three days, and he'd drunk the last of it. And then they'd all slept. Slept like the dead.

The moonlight swept through the window, catching her profile and his. He had a good face, she thought abstractedly, more handsome than not, if one cared about such things, as Ginty was just beginning to.

He caught his breath sharply. She felt tense and shivery all over - what was it that he had seen, a plane, a destroyer?

But he was only looking at her. He put a hand under her chin. Preparatory to making her drink the brandy, she supposed, and took a hasty gulp to pre-empt him.

He laughed at her. "That's right," he said. "How old are you, anyway? When I saw you last night, I thought you were just a little girl like the other one."

She couldn't think what to say. Perhaps he'd decided to leave them alone after all, and then been stricken with conscience about it. It didn't seem particularly likely, but nothing he'd done so far had been likely either. If he thought she was older, perhaps he'd go after all. No one would have balked at leaving _Rowan_ in charge of a lighthouse, even if it contained a whole infant-school.

Besides, she was just old enough not to like being called a little girl.

"Sixteen," she lied boldly, and took another drink of brandy before he unwrapped her fingers from the hip-flask and took it away from her. It felt as if it went all the way down into her belly in a straight drop, rather than going through all the hideous tubes they'd done the term before in Biology. There was nothing inside her but darkness, and fire.

"Maybe you are, at that. The girls in France all swore up and down they were eighteen, and didn't look older than a high-school kid of eleven."

She could feel his thumb under her chin, and his fingers against her cheek. She thought she would always remember them, painted on her skin.

He bent his head and kissed her. She supposed it was going to land on her forehead or cheek, the way kisses from aunts did, and was utterly unprepared when his lips met her mouth. It was a mistake, she was still thinking, like that time Emma had tripped during Country Dancing and planted her hands straight onto the bodice of Norah Greengrass's frock - when his tongue traced a delicate line along her lower lip and she realised it wasn't a mistake at all. His other hand settled itself around the back of her neck, providing, she was horrified to realise, the same sort of comfort that she herself might have offered a fretful horse. The weight of his body pressed against hers, bearing her backwards and down into the dark and onto the bunched uncomfortableness of her sleeping-bag.

Ginty struggled indignantly. He let her go at once, hands falling to his sides, his chancily illuminated face looking doggish and rueful but still not at all angry.

"Can't blame a man for trying, can you, my pretty?" he asked. He leaned forward; she put her hands up, to ward off she couldn't think what. He dropped another, entirely uncle-like and not at all alarming, kiss onto her brow. It made her think over the unpleasant pounding of her heart that perhaps she'd misinterpreted the first. She could feel herself going white with embarrassment. He didn't look amused with her any more. "Try and get some sleep."

He uncoiled himself from the bunk. Cold air rushed into the space where he had been sitting beside her. He made her a very proper naval salute and was gone, away, light-footed down the stairs.

Ginty scrambled herself back into the sleeping-bag. Her legs and feet felt like numb unhelpful lumps of ice. She could still feel a peculiar softness and loosening inside which, on the whole, she put down to brandy.

The next morning, she had pins and needles all over when Foley called her _my pretty_, rather unpleasantly, at breakfast, even thought she hadn't felt anything like that at all when he'd done so the day before. She spent the rest of the day avoiding him, feeling the weight of his imagined hand on her chin or her shoulder at odd moments all the day as she helped Peter with the light and through all that long nerve-tearing business with Nicola and the oar.

_Foley_, she thought as she applied a final swipe of lipstick and brushed her hair to a brisk snapping cloud. How odd that she should never have thought of him as Lewis, then or in all the years in between.

Perhaps she _had_ misinterpreted. Ten years later, she didn't think so. The firm pressure of that remembered arm about her shoulder, the casual skill with which he had folded her body back towards the bunk; above all the _attentiveness_ in the lines of his whip-thin body, half-seen in the dark. She knew all of those things now.

And, just as having been trapped in a cellar during the Blitz had given her years of thumping heart and unnameable terrors and the greatest terror of all, being _seen_ to panic, but had also made her rather attractively fragile and interesting in the eyes of those who knew about it, this had given her something too. She was surprised it had taken her this long to realise.

"Just another little girl like the other one," she said with satisfaction; and went out to be especially nice to Nicola at breakfast, and then to meet Bob at the station. Dear Bob, who always looked so much better even without the help-along of a naval uniform than most men looked with it.

"_Faithful_ Robert," said Ginty, and smiled at the mirror on the dressing-table.


End file.
